Malta Linux Repository

Imagination Technologies Ltd (IMG) (who purchased the former MIPS Technologies Inc (MTI)) is maintaining an additional repository containing a stable and tested kernel with focus on hardware support for IMG MIPS synthesizable cores and the Malta and SEAD3 evaluation board.

These kernels have undergone a range of conformance and soaktesting on the Malta platform, to provide 'stable' kernels with some degree of confidence. This code is now maintained on the linux-mti-* branches in the repository, or you can clone it from git://git.linux-mips.org/pub/scm/linux-mti.git.

Additional IMG generated configuration files can be found with the malta_defconfig in the MIPS configs directory:
arch/mips/configs/malta_*config. To use one of these configurations copy it to the root of your checked out linux kernel tree and run make oldconfig.

cp arch/mips/configs/malta_smtcconfig .config
make oldconfig

In order to build the kernel, you will probably have to specify the prefix of your cross-compilation toolchain. For example:

make CROSS_COMPILE=mipsisa32r2el-linux-

Note that the trailing '-' in the example above is a part of the prefix, not a typo.

If you want to submit changes back to linux-mips.org, you need to read Submitting Patches.

Memory Ordering Patches

By design, the MIPS32 specification allows for a weakly consistent memory model for shared memory multiprocessor systems. The rationale behind this relaxed model is that it provides opportunities for significant performance improvements with a reduction in hardware complexity. Unfortunately since a lot of Linux user-land software had x86 centric origins where the ordering is stricter, programmers didn't pay heed to ordering related constraints which cause unpleasant side effects when the software is run on weakly ordered systems. MTI's TimeSys based distribution contains patches to popular user-land software that was known to suffer from these problems. These patches are available here for people who are interested in fixing up similar problems in their own user-land software. While these patches are relevant to the distribution specific versions of the software, applying them to vanilla versions should be trivial.

Oprofile for MIPS

A patch that provides bugfixes and support for newer MIPS processor types is available here. The patch is against version 0.9.3 of the oprofile tools which are available for download here.